Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)
Isa 55.1-3;
Ps 144;
Rom 8.35, 37-39;
Mt 14.13-21
"The eyes of all creatures look to you
and you give them their food in due time."
We are all familiar with those very upsetting television news pictures which show people, often tiny children, cruelly ravaged by starvation. Such pictures are a powerful reminder that food and drink are our most basic human necessities. Without food and drink, we suffer intensely, and in the end, we die. In today's first reading, the prophet Isaiah was addressing a people who had known great suffering. They had been deported from their homeland, exiled to Babylon. Isaiah's message was one of consolation: their suffering would come to an end, and they would one day be able to return home. This return from Babylon would be a new Exodus, a reaffirmation of the covenant, the contract of love, between God and his people. Through the mouth of His prophet Isaiah, the Lord invites them to drink their fill of His covenant love: "Come to the water all you who are thirsty."
2. The psalm at Mass today speaks the same message of God's generosity: "The eyes of all creatures look to you and you give them their food in due time." Every living thing has life only because God gives it that life. Life is what God is offering to his people. Not just for the body, but life for the soul as well. And the reason for this offer is clearly stated both by the Psalmist and by Isaiah. The simple reason is his steadfast love for us. Steadfast love. Not the sort of love that vanishes like the mist. That is the sort of love we might call infatuation. The Lord does not deal in infatuation. God does not have crushes. His love is for life. Unbreakable, reliable, consistent. It's the sort of love summed up again and again in the Bible by the word covenant. Not a dead dry legal contract, but a living and self-renewing promise.
3. This unbreakable covenant-love is affirmed by Saint Paul in today's second reading. He speaks of a situation that Isaiah's audience, the Jewish exiles, would certainly have understood, and so I imagine can most of us: being troubled, being worried, being threatened. But Saint Paul assures us that all such troubles are the works of men. They will come to an end. "Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord". Remember also what Saint John says in a very familiar passage from his gospel, perhaps the best known verse in the whole Bible: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life." This gospel promise is the same as the promise relayed by Isaiah: life not merely for the body, but for the soul.
4. In many places in the New Testament, Christ Himself echoes the words of Isaiah. Isaiah says, "Come to the water all you who are thirsty." Jesus says, "Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." The episode in today's gospel shows Our Lord keeping this promise, satisfying the needs of the people who followed Him. They were so keen to hear what He had to teach them that they were prepared to follow Him far away from their homes, to a lonely place apart.
5. He had compassion on them. This compassion was not just a passing emotion. It led to something practical; it led to action. The people had followed Christ to hear His teaching, and now they were in a lonely place, and hungry. Their immediate need was not doctrine, but food, and that is what He provided. The people looked to Jesus, fulfilling the words of the psalmist: "The eyes of all creatures look to you, and you give them their food in due season. You open wide your hand, grant the desires of all who live." The responsibility Jesus felt for the people was evident in His behaviour, as in that of a Jewish household head. At meal times, the head of the household would take in his hands enough bread for everyone, would break it and distribute it to all those at table. And so Christ, the King of the Jews, took the bread and the fish, and broke them. He worked a miracle to satisfy the needs of His people. Once again, His actions proved what the psalmist spoke of: "the Lord is kind and full of compassion."
6. As well as looking back to the manna in the wilderness, Christ feeding the five thousand also looks forward. His actions clearly direct our minds to the Eucharist "Taking the five loaves and the two fish, Jesus raised His eyes to heaven and said the blessing. And breaking the loaves he handed them to the disciples.... " These words point forward to Matthew's account of the Last Supper later in the gospel: "Jesus took the bread and blessed and broke it, and gave it to his disciples". And this looking forward does not stop with the Last Supper and the Mass. It points us still further forward to what we heard about in the gospel for the last two Sundays, the kingdom of heaven. In many places in the Bible, the heavenly kingdom is compared to a rich and unending banquet, open to all. Remember Our Lord's words when He said: "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gives a marriage feast" or again when He says: "Many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven." The feeding of the five thousand was a brief but generous glimpse in advance, of the marriage feast of the King of kings.
7. The gift of Manna in the wilderness foreshadowed the feeding of the five thousand, and this miracle was an anticipation of the Eucharist. And the Eucharist itself is a down payment, so to speak, on the eternal banquet, which we shall enjoy, in the heavenly kingdom. God feeds us here and now in this holy Sacrament, and this feeding is a foretaste of the banquet he will one day lay before us in paradise, where no one will ever go short.
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